Shadowmoor's Mechanic Web

Devin LowFriday, April 25, 2008

n the early days of Magic design, the mechanics in a Magic set weren't always selected because they worked well together. In fact, they often had nothing to do with each other. Ice Age introduced cumulative upkeep, snow lands, and cantrips, none of which have anything to do with each other. Mirage features phasing and flanking, which have nothing to do with each other. And Tempest brings in shadow and buyback, which again have nothing to do with each other.

One of the advances of modern-day Magic design is that the design and development teams work hard to make all of a set's parts interconnect and work together. These subtle connections ensure that every card fits into the set in multiple ways, through multiple pathways and connections. As the set design evolves, these connections form a great web. This methodology opens up deck building and game play dramatically, since any particular card interacts with multiple elements of the set, instead of just one little section. For almost every mechanic, if someone asks "Hey, why is this here?" there are very specific reasons for how that mechanic fits into the rest of the set.

Today I'm going to show you how Shadowmoor's mechanics interconnect by leading you on a visual journey through Shadowmoor's mechanical web.

The Start of Shadowmoor

Magic's long-term block planning ensures that blocks have some themes in place before the design meetings even begin. Mark Rosewater did the block planning for the Shadowmoor block. His constraints included the fact that Shadowmoor is a two-set block, following up on the two-set block of Lorwyn / Morningtide. Mark also wanted Shadowmoor to be a block based on a totally new block theme, since Lorwyn was a revisiting the classic block theme of "tribal." Click the Next button to see Mark's first big set themes for Shadowmoor.

Color Matters

The creative team designed the worlds of Lorwyn and Shadowmoor at the same time as mirror images of each other: one light and cheerful, the other dark and evil. Since we knew Shadowmoor was the mirror image of Lorwyn, Mark had long pondered what mechanics could be the mirror image of Lorwyn's "creature type matters."

As Mark has written in recent articles, it was important that the Lorwyn theme would be supported throughout the neighboring Shadowmoor block as well, meaning that Shadowmoor block had to include all the same creature types as Lorwyn. Likewise, he wanted the major theme of Shadowmoor block to be backwards-compatible with the cards in Lorwyn block. What theme could be a mirror image to "creature type matters," and also be compatible with the cards in Lorwyn / Morningtide?

The answer was taking an element that exists in the background of every Magic card, and bringing it thundering to the foreground: "color matters" was the first major theme of Shadowmoor. Click the Next button.

Hybrid

Mark had long known that hybrid is a meaty enough mechanic to support its own block. The question was "When to deploy it?" The "color matters" theme provided the perfect complement for hybrid, since hybrid cards have lots of colors but are easy to cast. Hybrid cards also allow you to have green permanents in your Swamps-and-Mountains deck, which can help you take advantage of "green spells are awesome" and "green-red spells are awesome" cards even you though you don't have any Forests in your deck.

-1/-1 Counters

-1/-1 counters had originally been proposed as a Lorwyn mechanic by Lorwyn co-designer Paul Sottosanti. They felt so cruel and mean that they were eventually moved out of happy-go-lucky Lorwyn. A +1/+1 counter theme grew in Lorwyn and Morningtide to replace them. Those +1/+1 counters provided the perfect opportunity to setup a dark mirror image to that Lorwyn theme in Shadowmoor: Shadowmoor's -1/-1 counters.

As the first Shadowmoor design meetings began, these were our only foundations for the set: hybrid, "color matters," and -1/-1 counters. The task was to build a complete design on that foundation.

As the Shadowmoor design team explored different things that "color matters" could mean in a hybrid context, "color matters" quickly resolved itself into three major categories: rewards for playing a card of a particular color, rewards for playing cards of two particular colors, and color hosers that punished your opponents for playing a particular color.

Initiates

The "color matters" theme lends itself well to cycles, and Shadowmoor is intentionally more heavily cycled than most Magic sets for this reason. Many of the rewards for monocolored cards are thus cycled out across all five colors. The Apothecary Initiate cycle rewards for playing spells of the right color.

Cohorts

The Briarberry Cohort cycle demonstrates a simple, consistent, powerful reward for playing an additional creature of the same color: size. The different keywords in the cycle mean that added size has different implications in each case.

*/*s

The Crowd of Cinders cycle is similar to the Cohort cycle, in that the */*s also get bigger when creatures of the appropriate color are around. But there two big differences: First, the Cohorts give you maximum power for having just one extra card of the right color, but the */*s have no maximum, getting bigger and bigger as you play more on-color cards. In addition, the */*s see all types of colored permanents, not just creatures. (Remember: Swamps are colorless, not black.)

Mentors

The Bloodmark Mentor cycle shows the flipside of the */*s. Whereas the */*'s get more powerful for each on-color permanent you play, the Mentors make your other on-color creatures more powerful instead.

Duos

The Thistledown Duo cycle give some rewards for playing a single color of spells, but it's clear that to maximize them you want to play spells of both colors. Note that hybrid allows Shadowmoor monogreen decks to take advantage of rewards for two-color cards just as well as Shadowmoor white-green decks.

Lieges

Unblockables

The Mudbrawler Raiders cycle started out as five hybrid creatures who each had protection from the shared enemy color. In a set encouraging monocolored decks and heavily hybrid decks so much, however, "protection from white" played too often like "protection from deck." The color-hating unblockability makes these guys a significant offensive threat against their chosen enemy color, but still leaves opponents ways to stop the creatures with spells, or attack back against them.

Hate-Enhanced Spells

The Gloomwidow's Feast cycle show a change from previous color-hating cycles like Coldsnap's Cryoclasm, Deathmark, etc. Instead of being usable only against the hated colors, Shadowmoor's "hate-enhanced" spells can be used effectively against any color deck, then get especially powerful when used against either of the two hated colors. (Okay, Coldsnap's Karplusan Strider does something against non-blue-black decks too.)

Initiates Hate Too

Now the plot starts to thicken. The Apothecary Initiate cycle not only rewards you for playing on-color spells, but actually hates on your opponents spells of that color too, since each Initiate also triggers off of your opponents' color-appropriate spells. So the Initiates are color hosers as well as rewards for 1-color cards.

Counter Manipulation

Cards like Fate Transfer let you take -1/-1 counter cards like Chainbreaker and turn them into grisly death for opposing creatures. There are a lot of -1/-1 counter manipulation cards in Shadowmoor, and they definitely provide fertile ground for combination with other mechanics and elements in the set.

Wither

Rosewater recently wrote an article detailing how wither ties into the larger overall -1/-1 counter theme. Filled with art of hooks, serrated knives, ashes, and fire, the wither creatures definitely convey the cruelty of slowly torturing a creature to death that is all Shadowmoor. Wither combines well with the counter manipulation cards. Woeleecher, Fate Transfer, and Morselhoarder, among others, can take the -1/-1 counters inflicted on your creatures by wither, then savagely turn them back on your opponents. In a pinch, you can even move or use the -1/-1 counters your own wither cards put on opposing creatures.

Persist

Persist is the kind of mechanic that could totally take over a world that had no answers to it. Fortunately, -1/-1 counter cards like Scar, Torture, and Incremental Blight can tear persist creatures into little dead pieces, while wither creatures creep around as natural predators on delicious persist meat. This web of interaction ensures persist can often be answered and doesn't get too good.

Combining -1/-1 counter manipulaton with persist can allow you to make your persist creatures seriously immortal, sometimes killing enemy creatures with the moved -1/-1 counters or getting other bonuses along the way.

Dark Mirror

Many of Shadowmoor's cards were created as dark mirror images to Lorwyn and Morningtide counterparts. -1/-1 counters are a dark reflection of Lorwyn / Morningtide's +1/+1 counter theme, while "color matters" is a mirror image to Lorwyn / Morningtide's "tribe matters."

Hideaway Creatures

Isleback Spawn and his cycle of huge monster siblings show a menacing reflection to the idyllic peaceful hideaway lands like Shelldock Isle. It's just another way that dark mirror images are woven through Shadowmoor, and it's a reflection that the Magic creative team planned since the early design for Lorwyn.

Dark Duplicates

Another collection of dark mirror images in Shadowmoor are a noncycled sprinkling of cards that specifically call out and reverse their Lorwyn counterparts. Hollowsage is one of my favorite examples. Some of these specifically use the dichotomy of +1/+1 counters and -1/-1 counters to perform their reversal. Where Morningtide had Daily Regimen, Shadowmoor has Torture. Where Lorwyn had Incremental Growth, Shadowmoor has Incremental Blight.

(The Untap Symbol)

Tapping for Benefits

Shadowmoor has approximately one million bajillion ways to tap creatures to open up a variety of crazy combos. Power of Fire is a good example of a card that can be quite explosive with . I'll talk about these tapping enablers in more detail in a future article.

Untapping with -1/-1 Counters

Now that Shadowmoor had lots of costs and effects that tap creatures, what else could we hook into that mechanically? Cards that gain -1/-1 counters to untap themselves, like Devoted Druid, can also combine with creature tapping cards to produce some pretty nasty combos, especially when you throw some Giant Growth effects into the mix.

But these cards also tie closely into the whole -1/-1 counter theme. In fact, they were initially designed not specifically as tap combination pieces, but as a way to show a creature working itself to exhaustion by tapping a bunch of times in a single turn.

And -1/-1 counter manipulation effects can "cure" or move -1/-1 counters to other counters to other creatures to start the whole part over again, tying these cards into the set another way as well.

Conspire

Magic set designers do a lot to keep this kind of mechanic web in mind while making a set. The set's developers do too, and it was during development that Shadowmoor lead developer Aaron Forsythe decided he wanted another common spell mechanic that hooked into the set. Alexis Janson hit the nail on the head when she pitched the conspire mechanic, which ties in well to color matters, then also ties into Shadowmoor's cluster of tapping creatures synergies, with ties to enabling both and Devoted Druid style cards.

Hybrid also interacts interestingly with Conspire. Hybrid creatures can tap to conspire either of their colors, and hybrid conspire cards like Æthertow can be conspired by creatures of either color. You can see how well conspire brings different parts of the set together into a unified, integrated web.

Color Manipulation

It's pretty amazing how many different tricks a single color manipulation card like Prismwake Merrow can pull off in one set. Turning off your opponents' "two color matters" or "one color matters" or turning on your own color hosers already means that dozens and dozens of Shadowmoor cards interact with color manipulation.

Wisps

Rewards for Monocolored Decks

Monocolored decks are much easier to build in a heavily hybrid world than in other worlds, since so many more of the cards in the set are available to a monocolored deck. The Shadowmoor teams were excited about the new possibility for monocolored Sealed and Draft decks, and worked hard to build in rewards for monocolored Limited decks that would make this dream a reality. Shadowmoor also rewards monocolored Constructed decks.

The rewards for monocolored cards form a large part of this, but that's not the whole story. After all, Ballynock Cohort works almost as well in a Plains-and-Islands deck as it does in a mono-white deck. We also wanted specifically to reward mono-Plains decks.

Count Basic Lands

Monocolored Hybrid

Likewise, Spectral Procession rewards mono-Plains decks more than Plains-and-Islands decks. Monocolored hybrid also hooks into the hybrid theme as a new innovation in hybrid, serving two major roles by hooking in to the same web two different ways.

Rewards for Two-Color Decks

As I talked about in my Mistmeadow Witch preview last week, the "reward mono-Swamps" mechanics were so powerful and influential that the Shadowmoor development team decided it also wanted to reward Islands-and-Swamps decks with their own special benefits to increase the number of different paths you can take in the set and increase the deckbuilding diversity.

Rewards for two-color cards only do part of the work here, since a hybrid world means that all-Mountain decks can still include plenty of two-color cards and rewards for two-color cards. That's a cool trick that made us smile. But we still wanted to reward actual Mountains-and-Forests decks with two colors of mana.

Enhanced Spells

The Torrent of Souls cycle is a collection of hybrid cards that work fine with either color of mana, but work twice as well when you play them with both colors of mana. As such, they especially reward decks with two colors of mana.

Witches

HHH Creatures

The Boggart Ram-Gang cycle forms a list of some of the most powerful and efficient creatures in the set, taking full benefit of their multiple hybrid mana symbols. Boggart Ram-Gang rewards Forests-and-Mountains decks by being as easy to play as Bottle Gnomes in those decks, but showing considerably more brutality.

But Boggart Ram-Gang also rewards all-Mountains or all-Forests by being again as easy to play as Bottle Gnomes in those decks. So the Ram-Gang hooks in to both deck reward structures in the set. If you play Boggart Ram-Gang in a Swamps-and-Forests deck, with only half the lands in your deck matching the Ram-Gang's casting cost, you'll quickly see how awkward he is to play when he's not in one of the three deck types that he's intended to reward.

Poly H Activations

One of the things we know from the occasional monocolored decks of Limited formats in the past is that Looming Shades are always amazing in those decks. That made us want to add Looming Shades galore across the set to reward mono-swamp decks. When we went a step further by changing from Looming Shade to hybrid poly-activations like Loch Korrigan, these became rewards for decks with mana of the two correct colors as well as mana of just the one correct color.

There's a subtle cycle of Loch Korrigans across all five color pairs, each using hybrid-poly-activated pumping in a way that matches that color pair. My favorite is Foxfire Oak for his sheer bizarreness. GOGO BURNINGLOGBREATHING!

Demigods

Deus of Calamity and his four HHHHH friends reward decks with a single type of land or decks with the appropriate two-color combination of lands, in much the same fashion as Boggart Ram-Gang. But if you thought playing Boggart Ram-Gang in a Swamps-and-Forests deck was tough, just wait until your Swamps-and-Forests decks is trying to play Deus of Calamity! In a word, my prediction is, well, calamity.

So there you have it. That's how the entire set of Shadowmoor intertwines together like a giant, flexible level 2 Menger sponge. It's a pretty far advancement from Mirage's completely unrelated phasing and flanking.

There are many other connections I could also have listed, like linking Unblockables to Hybrid, since all unblockables are hybrid cards. In addition, many individual cards can link two bubbles, like the way that Leech Bonder links with -1/-1 Counter Manipulation. I avoided listing every single connection in order to keep the web from getting too visually tangled. As you spend more time playing Shadowmoor, you'll be able to see even more interconnections.

Last Week's Poll

Road trip time: How many times have you piled multiple people into a car to go play Magic?

Multiple times a year

3720

38.4%

Never

2790

28.8%

At least once in your life

2081

21.5%

About once a year

1095

11.3%

Total

9686

100.0%

Over 70% of respondents have made the Magic road trip, which is even more than I would have guessed. A statistic that was even cooler for me was that almost 50% of respondents make a Magic road trip every year. The spirit of the road is alive and well.